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Tuesday, 19 June 2012

Land Girls Interview

Hello all!

A while ago I did a post, Land Girls on BBC1, about how much I enjoyed the television show and I got a very pleasing response to it indeed. The writer of the show, Roland Moore, commented upon my little post thanking me for my feedback. I was some what delighted and thanked him for his response, I was even daring enough to ask that I might ask him a few more questions as a short interview for this blog. He's a much obliging chap and agreed to do so!

And so this is what transpired; I hope you find it entertaining and insightful!

Having never
worked in any form of media I felt a little out of my depth but soon I realised
that perhaps an insight into script writing from the perspective of someone
like me might be actually interesting; after all not everyone out there knows
all about media. So I sat and I thought, and I got a bit of advice. I realised
I know nothing so that’s where to start, exactly how does writing a television series,
like Land Girls, happen?

For Land Girls, I submitted
an idea outlining the story for each episode and an overview of the main
characters, plus a summary of the series. There wasn’t a script at that stage.
I knew (in 2008) that the BBC wanted to schedule programmes to commemorate the
70th anniversary of the outbreak of WWII, so my idea just arrived at
the right time. A five part series was commissioned for broadcast in September
2009.

As a child I was
shocked to find out about rationing and yet more shocked to find out that many
children were healthier than they are today. Surrounded by our comforts and
luxurious lifestyles it can be difficult to imagine what a situation like the
Land Girls may have faced. How does someone from the 00’s manage to portray an
era which many of us could literally not imagine today? I already guessed
research would be the key factor, but how did Roland go about this?

I spoke to former Land Girls
and read first-hand accounts of their times on the farms. I also read academic
books on the subject. When we came to write the series, we had historical
researchers helping us with any period details. This was invaluable.

Any period drama has to
juggle a line between total attention to detail and dramatic licence. The real
Land Girls typically worked 12-14 hour days, but we could only give a flavour
of that – otherwise most of the screen time would show women digging fields and
planting crops. Such authenticity would have resulted in a fairly uneventful
drama.

In terms of authenticity, we
came across an interesting phenomenon: people will have an idea of what is
correct for a period, but sometimes that idea is based on perception and not
facts. So viewers would ‘feel’ rather than know that something was correct or
incorrect. For instance, I realised the word ‘fantastic’ came into use in 1939
and ‘snog’ was already being used, but if I’d included them in the dialogue,
people would have complained that they weren’t accurate for the period. So
sometimes you are working to those perceptions rather than actual facts.

I can see how
difficult it must be treading the line between what is accurate and what the
audience may expect or want to see.
Having done some of that magic research on Roland I found out he has
also written for the BBC series Doctors. There must have been a bit of shift
between writing for such dissimilar decades and even I realised there must have
been some differences in the style, language and tone.

Language and tone are
definitely different for period drama. There is an argument between Bea and
Annie in Series 1, and I wanted Bea to say the equivalent of ‘whatever’. It was
obvious that this word wasn’t used like that in the 1940s, and as I researched
for an alternative, I realised that there wasn’t a World War II equivalent.
People were just more polite back then.

Interestingly, we had
complaints about a very minor, half-glimpsed sex scene, but no one seemed to
mind an extended scene of a man being forced to his knees at gun point before
someone is shot.

My Grandmother was in the ATS during the
Second World War and the Women’s Land Army is already a subject of great
interest to me, but what about other people? Why would they be interested in
such a dark period of our Country’s history? Probably for the same reasons I
am!

I wanted to write a drama
about the Land Girls because it was a time of major change for so many women.
They were forced to share living arrangements with other girls – from all
different backgrounds – in an era when women only really left the family home
if they got married. I was really interested in the themes of independence and
empowerment and these friendships forged through adversity.

Separation from your loved
ones was a theme that I also wanted to include as it affected a lot of people on the
home front. And it has resonances with anyone in the present day who has loved
ones serving overseas. There was that feeling that the war was bigger than any
one person and that everyone was a vital but small cog in the machinery of
winning that war. So I wanted to show Joyce’s sadness at being separated from
John, but wrestling with her need to be patriotic and ‘do her bit’. That was a
big emotional heart in the series.

About Me

About Me

I'm a lover of vintage living in the historic city of Lincoln with my fellow time travelling boyfriend, Indi. I have a passion for the 1920's to the 1950's and want to share this with you. In Lincolnshire we have many vintage events going which I will endeavour to tell you all about as well as other vintage goings on in my life including home décor, crafts, and cookery.

I hope you enjoy your visit to my blog and that it provide you with a little window to my life.